It will be noticed that in those cases where art is an enfeebling influence there is always a hiatus between the public and the artist. Let us consider the case of the folk-song as sung by the peasants of Suabia. Such songs are written by one peasant and sung by the next. The author and the singer and the hearer are all one. To the audience the song is life and emotion, social intercourse, love, friendship, the landscape, philosophy, prayer, natural happiness. You can hardly differentiate, in this case, between the artist and the public: both are unconscious. But if you take that song and sing it in a London drawing-room, or on a ranch in Colorado, it will perform a very different function in the audience. To these foreigners the song is a pleasing opiate. They hold it like a warm animal to their breast. The Oxford pundit who raves over a Greek coin, the cold-hearted business magnate in New York who enjoys the opera--these people live in so remote a relation to the human causes, impulses, and conditions behind the arts they love, that their enjoyment is exotic: it is more purely receptive, more remote from personal experience than the enjoyment of any living and native art could be. A certain sickness follows the indulgence in art that is remote from the admirer’s environment. This slightly morbid side of æstheticism has been caricatured to the heart’s content. The dilettante and the critic are well-known types. To a superficial view these men seem like enemies of the living artist. They are always standing ready to eat up his works as soon as they shall be born. Goethe thought criticism and satire the two natural enemies to all liberty, and to all poetry proceeding from a spontaneous impulse. And surely the massive authority of learned critics who know everything, and are yet ignorant of the first principles of their subject, hangs like an avalanche above the head of every young creator. We cannot, however, to-day proceed as if we were early Greeks, stepping forward in roseate unconsciousness. The critics and their hurdy-gurdy are a part of our life, and have been so for centuries. The brighter side of the matter is that the æsthetic person, even when morbid, is often engaged in introducing new and valuable arts to his countrymen. The dilettante who brings home china and violins and Japanese bronzes is the precursor of the domestic artist.